Ancient World Meets New One in Seeded Sprouted Sourdough

Lucy was thinking ancient this weeks and was studying the oldest thing she could think of at the time – The Sun.  The Poor thing is middle age at 5 billion years old and has an appetite like nothing else around here.  It gobbles up 400-600 million tons of hydrogen a second to overheat our world but it will be doing the overheating thing much better in the future.

It seems that over the next billion years or so the sun will get larger and burn hotter as it moves on to doing what all stars its size do.  The temperature on the Earth will be at least 100 degrees hotter then too – too bad for us poor humans long before then .......as the Earth’s oceans boil away.

But that is nothing, the Sun will keep getting bigger and hotter for another 4 billion years after that until the Earth is engulfed inside the expanding Sun and turned into a burnt cinder.   I asked Lucy why she was so into the Sun and she said that she wanted to bone up on man made global warming and one thing led to another.

One other thing it led to was the fact that Mars is also going through a period of global warming right now that is much worse than the Earth’s.  Then it made sense to Lucy why we want to send people to live on Mars.

Obviously, humans must be a moderating factor when it comes to the extremes of global warming.   The poor Martians need humans living there to help them moderate their totally out of control global warming thing they have going on there right now.  Sadly, we can’t get there for a coupe pf decades and by then all of the Martians might be dead - anther species we could have saved .....

After 6 hours of retard.

Truthfully, I am more concerned about what is going to happen to us poor humans over the next billion years as the Sun tries to fry us.  Is there nothing we can do?  How do we get the 7 billion people living here now (and who knows how many billions more by then) off the Earth to another home by then when we can’t even get a couple of people to Mars in time to save the Martians from reallybad global warming?

After 18 hours of retard.

Thankfully, Lucy says she has the answer to that question already figured out.  It is comforting to know that and we can sleep well knowing we will be safe and sound and be able to easily defeat the Sun itself .....as it comes knocking on our door like the grim reaper ......sooner than we think.

Off to this week’s Ancient meets New World bake including the 3 farros (not the pharaohs) from the Ancient World with potatoes and wheat from the New World…. even though wheat was introduced to the New World from the Old World but at least the wheat didn’t come from the Ancient World which would have ruined the whole post if you ask me.

The whole grains make up 50% of the flour in this mix, they were all sprouted and consisted of einkorn, emmer and spelt.   Boiled potato wasn’t enough so Lucy added potato flakes and used the water to boil the potatoes as the dough liquid.  In keeping with her penchant to put rye flour in every bread, she snuck some whole rye into the first of 3 levain builds.

She then retarded the finished levain for 12 hours when it doubled after the 3rd feeding.  There were 2 starters used of 6 g each.  Both were rye sour with the only difference being one had been stored in the fridge for 22 weeks and the other had been stored for only 6 weeks – another ancient and new twist according to Lucy.  The levain ended up being 15% pre-fermented flour.

After a 1 hour warm up of the levain and autolyse of the dough flour, now mashed potato, potato flakes and potato water with the pink Himalayan sea salt sprinkled on top, the levain was mixed in for the first of 6 sets of slap and folds- a new Lucy record for slap and folds and a move away from stretch and folds at the end to get the add ins well incorporated.

If you smoke some chicken thighs and country style ribs. you can make a tray of green chili, tomatillo, grilled onion and pepper, clour (or Florn) smoked meat enchiladas..

After 3 sets of 30 slap and folds on 30 minute intervals we did 3 sets of 4 slap and folds on 30 minute intervals when the seeds were added in.  The seeds included sunflower as well as chia and chopped flax seeds which were also soaked in 60 g of water so the chia seeds wouldn’t suck all the water out of the dough.  Instead of bulk retarding for 21 hours we decided to do a shaped retard of 18 hours.

Without a bulk retard on the counter we shaped the dough into a squat oval and placed it into a rice floured basket, bagged it in a trash can liner and in the fridge it went.  We checked it at 6 hours, thinking the bulk of proof would be over, the dough cold and it looked fine.

The net morning it was clear that the dough had continued to proof in the cold nearly as much as it had proof in the first 6 hours.  So much for the old idea that the proofing takes place early in the retard cycle before the dough gets too cold!  It looked a bit over proofed at the 18 hour mark, not horribly but definitely over proofed.

We immediately fired up Big Old Betsy to 500F with the Combo Cooker inside.  We un-molded the cold dough onto parchment on a peel.   It slashed easily and we slid it into the combo cooker and baked it at 450 F for 20 minutes covered.

When the lid came off we saw that the spring and bloom was less than usual die to the over proofing – but it did blister well with the dough being so cold.  We turned the oven down to 425 F and turned the fan on to dry the crust and brown it up.  5 minutes later we took the now set bread out of the cooker and put it on the stone to finish.

After 18 minutes of dry heat total, the bread thumped done and it had browned beautifully.  We turned off the oven and left the bread to crisp further on the stone with the oven door ajar for 5 more minutes.  We expect the crumb to be more open than usual because it always is when the dough goes through a shaped long retard and it over proofs a bit - and it seems to over proof every time this way too!

Lucy reminds us to not forget the salad to go with with that enchilada and the end of monsoon  Arizona sunset..

We will have to wait and see exactly what happened when we slice the bread for lunch in a few hours.  The crumb came out very soft moist and open for a bread of this type.  Most of all it is delicious.  The sprouted grains and seeds really came through and it made a fine summer sausage sandwich for lunch with the usual fixings.  We like this bread a lot,.